Of course you realize, that just makes you a literary snob. So oral traditions, handed down for millenia, have no meaning? Well i guess they wouldnt, given most such knowledge has been lost, due to bible totin missionaries.
No. Not a flood. The ink supply dried up while Isreal dealt with an international ink embargo. After promising not to use ink for biblical purposes, they were allowed just enough to write domestic contracts, deeds of sale...etc. Finally, about 60 A.D. (in the year of me), some Jewish people were able to smuggle some ink in and start writing the "New Testament" based on a true story. But in the 15th century it exploded. Many are still recovering from the fall-out. Jesus
what the different churches did very successfully was to discredit all other religions. but one fact is that many biblical stories are strikingly similar to earlier books in earlier cultures (the flood for example) and a second fact is that buddhism and hinduism are much older and are based on very spiritual books. it is current christian propaganda to think that these religions differ much in terms of spiritual content. buddhism is supposed to deny god and hindusim is supposed to have many. both ways to see it are very superficial and completely miss the point. in short: the essence of the big religions is one and the same. one and the same.
But the essence is how their interpreted, and no hardliners would accept anything else. The essence could be identical, quite literally, but you still end up with coke Vs pepsi, generic brands dont exist or are heretical, and dont you even think about drinkin no cordial. How this stuff ever caught on, is the mystery to me-john frum and the cargo cults are still organic religions in some parts, yet it should be highly evident from that curious example of "theism" alone, that all theology is debating myth. Yes, archeology backs up some things, but nobody is debating, or placing the actual faith in archeology now, are they..........we know the cargo planes actually existed too.
true spirituality in my eyes essentially overcomes the illusion of contradicting religions. in fact i think that the churches and different dogmatic perspectives, be they muslim, christian, semite, hindu or buddhist are early stage spirituality, which seekers will eventually overcome. to me the pope is more similar to the chairman of coca cola than to jesus christ. well, admittedly that goes a little too far ...
i for myself feel that i know the side of the curch quite well. it feels very much like how i operate most of the time. power, control, desire, greed, anger, pride, cruelty. and then, right after meditation there is this different perspective. and it is so intense and so complete different, it surprises me again and again. it is mentally, even pyhsically a very different perspective. and it is again and again a shock that in the usual state of mind i simply forget that the other one exists. literally. in this other state of mind, it looks very much like a game, what people do with religion. muslim suiciders in the name of allah. oh my goodness. how more wrong can you get it?
Its all very well to be happily spiritual. Doesnt mean the local sect, church, mufti , preist, or rabbi wont just change their shit up and have you and every other nonbeleiver killed in your sleep, or butchered en mass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew's_Day_massacre Religion (re, ignorance, prejudice) is, and always has been the driving force of mass hysteria, the most dangerous phenomena known to man. Disagree? Man, im thrilled you can find some peace in this, thats great, i cant describe what i know to be true, and i can guarantee none of these god botherer's would listen regardless. Oddly, legitimate miracles are crushed and discredited by established theological theory, while strange, yet natural coincidence and fortune are held up as saintly.
Uh-there must be a character limit or something on wiki or here, what a gip. At any rate, clearly i meant the saint bartholemews day massacre, not the guy himself, as saintly and wonderfull, and evidently dead and inconsequential, as he presumably was, and thus is.
skep·tic also scep·tic (skĕp'tĭk) n. One who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions. One inclined to skepticism in religious matters. I wear the skeptic badge proudly. Faith is a firm, stoic, and sacred conviction which is both adopted and maintained independent of physical evidence or logical proof. It is also an assumption of absolute accuracy and inerrent authority which must never be questioned. Science, on the other hand, is a matter of skeptical inquiry, in which nothing is sacred, and where even authority opinion is suspect. Its an objective method of measurably or verifiably improving our understanding of physical nature in practical application, or mathematics, or through experimentation and observation, and proposing falsifiable hypotheses explaining the facts in a theoretical framework to be subjected to a perpetual battery of critical analysis in peer review. Science parallels the rationalist perspective in that 'belief' should be tentative, conditional, and restricted only to that which is directly- supportable by logic or evidence; that, while many things may be considered possible, nothing should be positively believed unless positively indicated via the scientific method, and all assumptions must be questioned. In short, scientific methodology is the antithesis of faith, opposites in every respect.
I have a BS in biology & MS in Computer engineering. I spend major amounts of time staying current in most of the latest scientific research. I am quite confident my present amount of knowledge of science would bury yours. I am no detester of science, but much of their pursuits are little more than faith. A great example is cosmology. We now exist in 11-dimensional space, possibly involving strings/superstrings, which other scientists are now starting to ridicule, because it is elegant and yet conveniently unprovable. I reassert my previous definition of skeptic. You appeal to science as if it a great bastion of truth, You seem to have little grasp about how fragmentary and incomplete the science paradigm remains. How much argued many of the Science has done great things, but it remains in diapers in many fields. We are baffled in many areas of medicine, cancer cure rates are stubbornly high, we struggle to find alternative fuels, nutritional studies constantly contradict each other on many basics even like vitamin E, cosmology now consists of the unprovables, we struggle to understand the human mind or even gravity and an undending list of other areas. We make progress, but our knowledge is far less than you confidently espouse. I have posted previously, and the skeptics do not impress me. Almost all replies are posts from other sources; usually quite predictable ones. They claim pride in skepticism, when all they do mostly is question or ridicule, rather than add to the general knowledge. When it comes to the concept of God or infinite things, they cannot admit they have little ability to understand inifinite things; none of us has. But it doesn't stop the behavior (like 2 year olds) from saying, "NO!!!! It has become an instinct. Again, I am unimpressed. And I again suspect the answers will remain at this level. So far, they remain on target... But I will leave you to your smugness. Time draws much shorter than we all know.